114: BSD-Schooling

This week, Allan is out of town at another Developer Summit, but we have a great episode coming

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Wired has interviewed WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, about the infrastructure behind WhatsApp
WhatsApp manages 900 million users with a team of 50, while Twitter needs around 4,000 employees to manage 300 million users.
“FreeBSD has a nicely tuned network stack and extremely good reliability. We find managing FreeBSD installations to be quite straightforward.”
“Linux is a beast of complexity. FreeBSD has the advantage of being a single distribution with an extraordinarily good ports collection.”
“To us, it has been an advantage as we have had very few problems that have occurred at the OS level. With Linux, you tend to have to wrangle more and you want to avoid that if you can.”
“FreeBSD happened because both Jan and I have experience with FreeBSD from Yahoo!.”
Additional Coverage ***

We have a very detailed blog post this week from Randy Westlund, about his experiences on Linux and BSD, contrasting the init systems.
What he finds is that while, it does make some things easier, such as writing a service file once, and having it run everywhere, the tradeoff comes in the complexity and lack of transparency.
Another area of concern was the reproducibility of boots, how in his examples on servers, there can often be times when services start in different orders, to save a few moments of boot-time.
His take on the simplicity of BSD’s startup scripts is that they are very easy to hack on and monitor, while not introducing the feature creep we have seen in sysd.
It will be interesting to see NextBSD / LaunchD and how it compares in the future! ***

At the recent “All Things Open” conference, opensource.com interviewed Jim Salter
He describes how he first got started using FreeBSD to host his personal website
He then goes on to talk about starting FreeBSDWiki.net and what its goals were
The interview then talks about using Open Source at solve customers’ problems at his consulting firm
Finally, the talks about his presentation at AllThingsOpen: Move Over, Rsync about switching to ZFS replication ***